American Digest - The Top 40

Comments: Certified Kosher!

Back in my compository days at a Nameless Newspaper Out West, I worked with a woman aptly named Connie. She was the most conniving goldbrick I'd ever had the good fortune to work for. I say 'for', because someone always had to pick up her slack, had to come in when she called off for the myriad of phantom illnesses that she miraculously came down with at inopportune times.

For example, every year she had an annual "Christmas Week Biopsy."

One year, however, she found the perfect con. The best scheme ever: She converted to Judaism. Just like that!

Of course, we didn't believe it for a minute.

Converting to Judaism is a torturous ordeal, strongly discouraged by rabbis because it is a very legalistic process. Not something to ever be entered into lightly.

Why on earth, we asked ourselves, would Connie even WANT to be Jewish?

Answer: Friday night and Saturday comprise the Sabbath, which fell conveniently on her shifts.

Never mind that there was no synagogue in our town. Friday evening and Saturdays are hard for the composing crew, because that is when the Sunday sections are all put together. Every warm body is needed to assemble those Sunday sections that can't be pre-printed.

But Connie, dear religious Jew that she became, proved her religious zeal by coming in with bagels and lox, to show the management that she'd indeed converted. She was sporting a new Star of David round her neck as proof.

Come Passover time, I passed her over in the meat department of the grocery store, with Easter baskets and chocolate bunnies...and crowning the glory of her Easterized shopping cart, a large spiral cut ham.
She hadn't seen me, but when I went to work that afternoon, I told the gals about the spectacle of the kosher ham.

"She was out shopping?" one of them asked.
"She called in sick!"

It was the kosher ham that got her fired at last.
Merry Christmas, Connie, wherever you are!